Comment by Qwertious
3 years ago
>but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I answered that the police and ambulances were obviously breaking the rules, because they are. The difference is that ambulances/police are allowed to break the rules in an emergency - famously, ambulances have a legal right to speed and run red lights in an emergency, and cops obviously have a right to trespass.
This of course is a paradox, as a rule is something that you are forbidden from doing, and being allowed to break the rule means you're allowed to do something you're forbidden from doing, which when interpreted literally is an oxymoron.
The obvious explanation is that the cops/ambulances have a set of rules that take priority over the park's rules , and some rules are more important than others.
You just made me look up the rules in germany. The wording is somewhat particular. "An emergency vehicle following a higher cause can invoke special rights ("Sonderrechte") indicated by blue flashing lights. These special rights authorize the driver of the vehicle to divert from the regular traffic laws as long as done safely." Interestingly, this is separate from the "Right of the way", which can be ordered on top using a siren. This is why they need to run the siren for 2ish seconds before running a red light for example.
So yeah, an ambulance speeding to save a life is breaking the traffic laws, but they are allowed to.
Interestingly, if the ban of vehicles in the park had an additional reason - like a safety concern of unstable collapsing ground - an emergency vehicle in the park would be barred from invoking their special rights to be there, because then the driver would endanger bystanders without good reason.
In fact, in Germany, everyone would be authorized to enter that park with a vehicle if it were necessary to avoid serious danger or to save others from serious danger. This is referred to as 'rechtfertigender Notstand'.
> which can be ordered on top using a siren. This is why they need to run the siren for 2ish seconds before running a red light for example.
Pretty sure that's because people need time to notice the siren and take appropriate action, not because of some rule
It's both of that. It has been determined that 2 seconds of siren should be enough for everyone on an in intersection to realize what's going on.
And that's why there is a rule for drivers of emergency vehicles to sound the siren for at least 2 to 3 seconds when approaching an intersection with an intent to disregard other peoples right of way. The rule for normal traffic partakers is very much "If it flashes blue and has music, get the hell out of the way as fast as you can without endangering yourself"
This rule in turn is in contrast with the overall suggestion to keep siren usage low, because it's loud, disturbing for bystanders and not great for the hearing of the people inside the car.
But you need to put that in the rule, otherwise you have crashes.
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> I answered that the police and ambulances were obviously breaking the rules
I think the ambiguity here is not what the rule means, but what "breaking the rules" means.
IMHO it should have been phrased as "would you refuse entry to" i.e. whether you would enforce action based on the rule.
If you would not bar entry to emergency vehicles, that would be the same as what others mean by "not breaking the rules" i.e. it is implicitly allowed.
The instructions read:
> Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park." Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
Violation of a rule is a logical operation. It's the answer that comes before the ", but ..." part. Things you explicitly don't have to do in the context of this game:
- You don't have to like the rule
- You don't have to consider exemptions (because that's not what the rule asks for)
You just need to answer, if the rule has been violated. I think it's absolutely fascinating that this is so controversial and a testament to the authors game design.
I think it's a fascinating practical example of how "baked in" cognitive bias is. The sort of people that use HN tend to be highly analytical. Yet nonetheless we see a massive public display of people rationalizing their failure to directly answer the question that was very clearly and unambiguously asked while pretending that they did.
The logical exercise is extremely close (by design) to one that commonly occurs in everyday life. In real life people want to bend the rules to achieve a certain outcome when applying them. They don't want to say "well a rule was violated but I'm exercising discretion". That's on full display here even though no meaningful outcome is actually being determined in this case.
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"break" / "violate" have same semantic ambiguity. You can't separate language from the rest of one's comprehension of the world e.g. most would probably agree that in general, "a rule" cannot prevent someone from saving a life. Overriding moral necessity is built into the understanding of the limitations of "a rule". It's implicit and does not need to be spelled out explicitly.
When you face this sort of thing in philosophy, the clarifying step is to move past language and look at behaviour which would be the enforcement.
> You just need to answer, if the rule has been violated
You can't dismiss ambiguity with a "you just need to"!
In conventional language we get the ambiguity expressed as distinctions like "technically you have a broken a rule but..." i.e. there are "technical" interpretations of rules that are specific/pedantic/unrealistic that in practice are not what is meant or enforced.
I expect there will be a desire here to over value "technical" interpretations as if they were more accurate having stripped cultural conventions and such but that is a means to misinterpret language not find truth.
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See, even there for me it's rather a "firefighters/police have an exemption to the rules". For you it's "firefighters/police are breaking the rule but it's fine".
Except the blurb at the start clearly says there are no exemptions. The only rule is "no vehicles in the park". So all you're judging is 1.) is it a vehicle? and 2.) is it in the park?
Yeah, I actually thought that the phrasing of the blurb weighted the answers in a particular direction, and was surprised to discover that most did not answer questions about emergency vehicles as violating the rule. To quote specifically, it says "...please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
In fact, it sort of seems like this sentence should wreck the effort to demonstrate the difficulty of content moderation. I would think that a significant amount of the difficulty comes from instances where moderators feel that interactions between different rules mean they should allow violations of particular rules in certain situations.
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Yup, without clarification the rule might be there because any vehicle might just be immediately stuck in the terrain. Or hit a landmine. The assumption of course is that it is just a normal park
Here where I live, the latter is actually precisely how the traffic law enforcement works: emergency services get tickets in the post for traffic violations same as everyone else, and it is up to the officials to check their logs and respond with "the vehicle was responding to an incident", which is a valid defence and gets the violation dismissed; or not, as the case may be, if it turns out the crew ran a red light while on their way home or something.
In any case, the question of whether the rule was violated is entirely separate from the question of what, if anything, the consequences of this should be; and it is the former that I understood the game to be asking.
The fact that there is so much debate over the question of what the game was even asking the player to do, with both sides convinced that their interpretation is the obvious correct one, does as much to support the thesis that people have an enormous amount of trouble agreeing on the intent of a simple short piece of text as the rest of the game itself.
>Here where I live…emergency services get tickets in the post for traffic violations same as everyone else, and it is up to the officials to check their logs and respond with “the vehicle was responding to an incident”
I assume you are referring to traffic laws that are enforced by cameras. Is that correct?
Where do you live?
I answered in the same way. I chose to interpret the rule as "no functioning registered terrestrial road vehicles", in which case emergency vehicles are violating the rule.
So you would've considered the Honda Civic to not be violating the rule, if it had been unregistered?
Hmmm, maybe I should have said "any supposed-to-be-registered vehicle"!
My approach was that the tank and the emergency vehicles were all strictly violating the rule, and that in a reasonable world they would all have some external dispensation for being allowed to violate the rule.
Would a dune buggy be allowed?
"Honest, officer, it's unregistered!"
(driving a tank through the park)
In my country ambulances are allowed to run red lights, but not speeding. Actually they have their own rules that allow speeding in certain roads if the are in an emergency over their own limit: they are limited to 90 kmh in the motorway, but can go up to 120kmh, like any other car, in an emergency. Over that, they could potentially get a ticket. But AFAIK they can never go over the limits a normal car has.
When I read "obviously" in your parent comment, I though: well, not so obvious. We don't know why the vehicles are banned from this park (extreme cases: there are vehicle mines remains from a war that explodes under big weights. Park is built so ir can't stand so much weight and big vehicles would get trapped), so maybe police and ambulances must proceed on foot for the last hundred meters.
I answered the same way as you. Because there are rules and there are laws. The only reason park rules have any weight is in a larger context of laws. So, if the only park rule is "no vehicles in the park", then clearly the rule is violated by an emergency vehicle, but it will be that larger context that determines whether anyone cares if the rule was violated.
> The difference is that ambulances/police are allowed to break the rules in an emergency - famously, ambulances have a legal right to speed and run red lights in an emergency, and cops obviously have a right to trespass.
I think this is just a way of saying that they are not breaking the rule, simply because the rule doesn't apply to them.
It's more complex: in many countries if an ambulance hits a car while running a red light because of an emergency, the ambulance is at fault, as they were breaking the rules.
So the rules still apply to them, they just won't be pursued on theoretical grounds (getting fined/arrested sheerly because of the infraction, without any other consequences)
> The obvious explanation is that the cops/ambulances have a set of rules that take priority over the park's rules
I prefer the following quote as an explanation: "There are no rules, only consequences." There are no consequences for an ambulance entering the park because everyone agrees it is right that it should do so.